The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

Khronos Group News Archives

Avid® unveiled version 5.2 of Avid Deko® 3000, an on-air graphics package that supports the industry-standard FBX and COLLADA formats. This enables customers to easily import and playback a broader range of 3D models and animations from leading applications such as Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Softimage 7.5 and MAXON CINEMA 4D. "By using proven industry interchange formats like COLLADA and FBX, Avid is providing tremendous incentive for customers to invest in the new Deko offerings," said Jeff Sargeant, a 3D artist and the creative director of design firm, Sargeant Inc.
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NVIDIA Corporation announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.
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The new gDEBugger V5.0 adds support for OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL's new deprecation model. A new Deprecated Function Statistics tab was added to the Statistics viewer. This tab displays information about deprecated functions and deprecated behaviors used by the debugged application. This tab also suggests forward-compatible replacements to each deprecated feature. gDEBugger V5.0 also includes gDEBugger for Apple Mac OS X. This new product brings all of gDEBugger's Debugging and Profiling abilities to the Mac OpenGL developer's world. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
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Google announced that they are changing the way COLLADA and Google Earth files from the Google 3D Warehouse are served up. Currently, Google Earth files in the 3D Warehouse are simple 'wrappers' around COLLADA 3D model files, and up until now, they've simply provided the COLLADA (and consequently, the Google Earth) files that SketchUp has produced. Google has changed things so that soon after you upload a file, a COLLADA/Google Earth file is generated on the server using the provided SketchUp file. The big news is that every model in the 3D Warehouse will now be available in the COLLADA format.
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The Khronos Group has awarded a contract for the final development of the COLLADA 1.4 conformance suite. The conformance suite will allow Khronos Adopters to test their COLLADA 1.4 implementations and earn a badge for either Baseline, Superior or Exemplary conformance. These badges represent increasing levels of support for COLLADA features and robust interoperability among conforming applications. End users will benefit by using tools with known levels of conformance for the features they need from the best products on the market. This contract will build off the recent contribution from Intel that greatly improved the test suite and framework.

Mark Barnes, COLLADA working group chair says “Development of the COLLADA conformance suite is the work group’s top priority for 2009. It’s essential for us to foster a healthy COLLADA ecosystem of tools and applications for artists and developers working with open content pipelines.”

Yumetech has been awarded the contract in an open bid process. Yumetech specializes in the creation of open standards and open source software for 3D graphics development. The company has prior experience developing portions of the X3D conformance suite and is a current member of Khronos and participates in the COLLADA working group.

“Yumetech is committed to the development of open standard 3D graphics solutions. This contract aligns well with our vision of providing open content pipelines for our customers’ data. It allows us to further improve both the COLLADA standard and provides the value of data portability required by our customers”, says Alan Hudson, President Yumetech.

The availability of the COLLADA within the Khronos Adopter’s package has been planned for August 2009.

"Nucleus Multimedia Services" is an implementation of the OpenMAX IL standard for Nucleus Real Time OS. It ships with a fully functional library of standard components which allow common audio/video playback configurations.
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Altia, Inc. announces that its HMI development tools, Altia Design® and Altia DeepScreen® have been selected for use in its "Energy Aware" home appliance platform. Altia HMI software provides embedded systems developers with the capability to create complete custom graphical user interfaces and graphics code without programming graphics. These working interface prototypes are quickly deployable to an Altera Corporation Cyclone® series FPGA and provides power line networking capability to home-appliance applications with LONWORKS® Power Line transceiver board from Echelon Corporation. Altia DeepScreen supports OpenGL ES. The Altia OpenGL ES DeepScreen target is OS independent and may be ported to any environment with or without an OS. This target is suitable for both high and low end systems that have OpenGL. The OpenGL ES target is very lightweight and takes advantage of hardware acceleration wherever possible (for example, when rotating or scaling images). It all adds up to exceptional embedded target performance. Together, Altia and OpenGL ES offer a package that gets cutting-edge, animated, custom GUIs on the lowest cost hardware in the shortest time.
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GarageGames has revealed that Torque 3D, the latest version of its popular Torque development environment, will feature the ability to publish games playable directly in web browsers. Torque 3D is a self-contained engine and development environment that offers more straightforward web publishing. The Basic version of Torque 3D will include new physics technology, a COLLADA-driven content pipeline, the new material editor and unified terrain system, and other feature debuts. Thanks largely to COLLADA, "Torque will basically work really easily with any of the major art tools that are popular in games," GarageGames business development VP Brett Seyler promised.
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The Khronos™ Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an ‘Accelerated 3D on Web’ working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months. Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, stand for chair, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release. The working group will consider various approaches including exposing OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities within ECMAScript. The Khronos Accelerated 3D on Web working group will commence work during April 2009.
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The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has publicly released the OpenSL ES™ 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance, low-latency audio functionality on mobile and embedded devices. The OpenSL ES standard simplifies deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities across any platform or operating system and provides broad audio portability for application developers. The specifications are immediately available for download and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers. An Adopters Program for OpenSL ES including extensive conformance tests to ensure cross-implementation consistency and trademark usage by conformant implementations will be released by Khronos during April 2009.
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The Khronos™ Group announced it has publicly released the OpenGL® 3.1 specification that modernizes and streamlines the cross-platform, royalty-free API for 3D graphics. OpenGL 3.1 includes GLSL™ 1.40, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides enhanced access to the latest generation of programmable graphics hardware through improved programmability, more efficient vertex processing, expanded texturing functionality and increased buffer management flexibility. OpenGL 3.1 implementations are expected shortly from multiple vendors. The new OpenGL 3.1 specification and more details are available here. The official OpenGL 3.1 feedback thread is available here.
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Luxology® LLC announced a new customized COLLADA plug-in for the soon to be announced modo® 401. Introducing a host of new features for exporting from modo and a totally new COLLADA importer, modo 401 users will be able to easily preserve key attributes of their modo creations for file export and round-trip manipulation even in complex 3D pipelines. Luxology will be demonstrating its new COLLADA plug-in at the GDC 2009 Chalk Talk session at the Intel Visual Adrenaline Lounge from 1:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 26.
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